Do you think time appears to move faster as you get older? - And if so, why?

[Forsaken Wanderer]

As you get older the days just seem to race by, as a kid an hour was a decent amount of time, as an adult you blink and that hour is gone quicker than a 100 dollar tip in DSP's Paypal account. Do you experience this phenomenon? And if so, why do you think it happens?

My theory is that the brain's clock speed gets slower so that you think you are doing things at the same speed you always did but you are actually thinking and moving slower.

It's time to answer

 

[Ultrapenguin]

Why is your question in funny colors? Very avant garde.

And I think it mostly happens because people just get more sluggish and set into routines as they get older, so they spend more time with their brains shut off. There are fewer novel stimuli to punctuate the timeline mentally, which gives the perception of time moving faster.

Of course when you're the average kiwi (a hardcore hustler always on the grind) your mind never sleeps so you always have a consistent perception of the passage of time.

 

[Smug]

Perspective.

If you're 5 years old, then if we assume you sleep 8 hours every night, each hour you're experiencing is over 1/30,000th of your entire waking life. Factor in how poor your long term memory of when you were below the age of like 3-4 typically is, and it becomes an even bigger chunk of time relative to your total experience of time.

In contrast, by the time you're 50, each hour will feel like and effectively be barely more than 1/300,000th of your whole waking life.

That's an insanely big difference in relative experience. It's ticking by at the same rate, but that's why it feels so much faster.

 

[DinnerDates]

Yes I notice that too, I think as you get older your perception of time changes with it.

 

[Dysnomia]

Depends on what's going on. Everything seems to take forever when I don't feel like doing it. That never changes. An hour of chores might as well be five.

 

[Norbert the Tiger]

Yes, it is because as you get older any increment of time is a smaller prtion of the life you have lived. A five year old perceives a month about the same way a 30 year old perceives a year.

This interactive visualization (only works in desktop) is illustrative of this is so.

Why Time Flies

Your Life in Fractions - An Interactive Explaination Why Time Flies

maximiliankiener.com

This Interactive Timeline Explains Why Time Flies By as You Get Older

Did it seem like this year was shorter than the last? This interactive timeline explains how your brain’s perception of time might be changing more and more as you get older to make it seem like time is passing by faster than it really is.

lifehacker.com

 

[Mariposa2.0 LTE]

Why am I not dead yet?

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Every year as a little kid is big changes, but life gets more same-y the older one gets?

 

[Catler]

I don’t really buy the fraction of time argument, people are terrible when judging time in general.

I think a lot has to do with novelty. The older you get the less new there is, your routine is disturbed less, and you can go weeks on autopilot easily if you choose to.

 

[.iota.]

this question was posed in another thread awhile ago, and @Uncle Buck posted an interesting article that addresses the phenomenon. i agree with what the poster above wrote about our perspective of the passage of time relative to our age, though there may be more to it than that ...

we also experience things much more intensely when we're young, because it's all new. think of the first time that you listen to a song that you've not heard, or travel somewhere you've never been, or read a book that you've not read. time seems to slow and stretch during those moments, because we're taking in a tremendous amount of information as our brains form new neural pathways regarding the experience.

as we become older, and many more pathways have been formed, we have less capacity to process as much information. the songs, the places, and the books become a little less distinct, a little less unique, and they seem to pass by much more quickly.